MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

US calls at the UN for an end to the Decolonisation Committee, key to Argentina’s claim

The Argentine government has not commented on the US position, which contrasts with the close alliance between Milei and President Donald Trump

The United States has called at the UN for an end to the mandate of the Special Committee on Decolonisation, the body before which Argentina presents its sovereignty claim over the Falklands every year, and described some of its activities as “a waste of resources”, according to the official summary of the General Assembly Fourth Committee session held on October 15.

The committee approved more than 20 draft resolutions that day, many of them recommended by the Special Committee, “even as the representative of the United States called for an end to that body’s mandate”, according to the UN statement. Washington has not tabled a formal proposal to dissolve it, which could only be approved by the General Assembly, where there is no veto and the committee enjoys the support of a broad majority of states.

The committee, created in 1961, reviews each year the situation of 17 non-self-governing territories, ten of them administered by the United Kingdom, including the South Atlantic archipelago. Successive foreign ministers under Javier Milei’s government have attended its June sessions to call for the resumption of sovereignty negotiations; the current one, Pablo Quirno, did so on June 25. The United Kingdom maintains that the islanders have the right to self-determination and that in the 2013 referendum they chose to keep their status as a British overseas territory.

The Argentine government has not commented on the US position, which contrasts with the close alliance between Milei and President Donald Trump. According to the newspaper Infobae, the issue could be raised during this week’s visit to Buenos Aires by Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau and Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs Juan Pablo Segura.

At the same session, Argentina abstained on a Russian-backed resolution on contemporary forms of colonialism. At the General Assembly in September, Milei had described the islands question as “a national cause” and called for Resolution 31/49, which urges the parties not to introduce unilateral changes while the dispute persists, to have consequences.